Thinking and Living Skills for Re-Integration

The Thinking and Living Skills for Re-Integration programme provides offenders with the cognitive skills required for adequate social and emotional adjustment. The programme takes a psycho-educational and cognitive-behavioural approach, in order to impart knowledge and skills that will ultimately aid in offenders adopting more pro-social behaviour and attitudes.

The programme aims to replace the maladaptive thinking patterns of offenders with cognitive skills that can promote pro-social behavioural choices. Offenders are taught to become more reflective rather than reactive and more anticipatory in their responses to potential problems, and more anticipatory in their responses to potential problems, thus resulting in them learning to consider the consequences of their actions instead of just acting impulsively. Also, the programme aims to teach offenders to be more flexible and open-minded, reasoned and deliberate in their thinking. Using psycho-education, the following developmental areas were covered: self-control and self-management, inter-personal problem solving skills, assertiveness and social skills, social perspective taking, critical reasoning, cognitive style and values reasoning.